A viscoelastic Unitary Crack-Opening strain tensor for crack width assessment in fractured concrete structures

Abstract

A post-processing technique which allows computing crack width in concrete is proposed for a viscoelastic damage model. Concrete creep is modeled by means of a Kelvin–Voight cell while the damage model is that of Mazars in its local form. Due to the local damage approach, the constitutive model is regularized with respect to finite element mesh to avoid mesh dependency in the computed solution (regularization is based on fracture energy).